Angela stands there for a while, suitcase in hand, looking at the overgrown, familiar garden. The bougainvillea vines creeping up the rusted railings, weaving together red, white, and purple blossoms, both mesmerize and paralyze her. The yellow crotons and old man’s beard are still there, hiding patches of discolored and chipped paint. Years in Atlanta have not made her lose her love of this haphazard garden, and she wonders how she could have ever left this little house in Falmouth, Trelawny.
Picking up the suitcase, Angela walks up the stone path. The house is still. Her family is never usually this quiet, but then this is no joyous reunion.
Can she still call them her family?
She stops when she spots the old red pick-up van parked in the garage. It is worse for wear, but it comforts her that it survived the tumult of her marriage.
She walks up the cobbled stone steps that Kwame had lain by hand and taps on the door. When no response comes, she turns the knob, but it doesn’t budge. So, she hikes up her flowing summer dress and steps over the overgrown grass to the backyard. She half expects to see Kwame feverishly thrusting the fork into the earth as she has seen him do a hundred times and half dreads, half anticipates their encounter after so long.
There is no one there, so she calls again, then pushes the door. It swings open.
“Hello?” Her sandals click through the silent house.
She looks around at her mother’s touches everywhere – from the colorful hooks with the hanging pots in the kitchen to the makeshift nurseries of mint plants growing in old juice cartons on the window ledge.
But what has changed since she left?
The dining room seems a little bigger with its newly painted salmon walls and sparse handmade rose-wood furniture. The adjoining living room is unchanged, still with the cream settees she had bought in a Christmas sale seven years ago, just before she left. The coffee table is new, unvarnished cedar wood. She runs her fingers across the surface.
Kwame’s work.
Angela jumps. A figure has come into the room. The girl’s braids are rumpled and hang to her waist. Angela cannot believe that this slender teenager looking at her now, eye-to-eye, is little Della. Now, she has a defined waist, hips and a bosom. Angela smiles and begins to walk toward her.
“Angela,” Della says evenly, taking a step back. This stops Angela’s advance.
“Della…” Her voice trails off, not sure how to engage. That Della has called her by her first name and not any term of motherly endearment feels like a jab, but it is not surprising.
They last talked three years ago on her birthday. Della had said little, and Angela had not known what to say beyond the obligatory greetings.
“You know grandma’s funeral is Saturday, not Friday, right? Daddy sent out the wrong information,” Della’s says evenly now.
“Yes…Yes…I know,” Angela answers. “He called…”
Della is already retreating. Angela realizes she has been wringing her hands together like a schoolgirl. She pulls out the chair at the dining table and sits down. She presses fingers to her temples and tries to regain her composure as Della slips into her room and closes the door. Angela undoes the bun at the top of her head and lets her curls loose. They frame her face.
Kwame’s voice on the phone had been just as detached as Della’s was just now: Her mother was dead. It was sudden. He was sorry. The funeral was Saturday.
That was all.
He did not call her “Annie” as he had done for ten years. He did not embellish as she tried to make sense of his words. Eventually she’d replied: Yes. She was still there. Yes. She would take the next flight out. Yes. She would pay for everything. No. She was not bringing Paul. There had been no Paul for years. Could she stay at the house?
She is not sure what she had expected of either of them, but it has left her feeling hollow. The worst is realizing that her mother’s kidneys had failed while she was trying to live like a woman with no past in another country, with a man who had abandoned her in the same way she had her own family.
When Angela was growing up, Olivine was rarely sick. When she left, her mother was still dancing dinky mini during festival time. In fact, Miss Vee, as she was known throughout the community, had a stamina that promised she would outlive them all.
Angela does not realize she is crying until she has to wipe her eyes. She finds Timothy looking at her curiously. She straightens in surprise. He, too, is now so tall, now all elbows and knees.
“Mommy?” he says, his face open, his hands full of guavas.
It is the way he says it that makes the tears spring again. It is as if he is that seven-year-old again, seeing her after one of her business trips. She expects indifference as Della has just shown, but he dumps the bag of guavas on the table and she feels his two skinny arms gruffly holding her.
“You’re so big! You’re so big!” She keeps repeating, alternating between pushing him away to look at him and squeezing him close.
“Go and get the bags out front before someone takes them,” Kwame’s voice filters into the mix of crying and laughing.
“Yes, Daddy,” Timothy says, rushing out.
“I can’t believe he’s fourteen,” she says, forgetting herself.
She looks at Kwame’s unsmiling face and sobers, wiping her eyes again. He has come through the living room holding two bags of Styrofoam cups and some ice.
“Wasn’t expecting you until tonight,” he says.
“No… I got an earlier flight. I thought I told you,” she says. “You need me to do anything?”
“No. No. I had plenty help,” he says.
They regard each other for a few stiff seconds. She isn’t sure if he is exhibiting anger or indifference. Could he still be angry? She used to be able to tell the difference. He looks the same – same tall frame, same dark brow, same brown eyes, same firm jaw line – except he no longer has a potbelly. She wonders if that means he has stopped drinking.
“We having the wake here?” she asks, just to say something. Where else would they have it?
“Yes,” he says, walking into the kitchen. “We can expect the whole lane.”
Angela has hoped for at least one night’s rest before she sees any of the neighbours.
“Of course. Of course,” she says following him. “Everybody loved Mama.”
She is back to not knowing what to do with her hands.
Timothy pulls in the large suitcase, stops and looks in his father’s direction.
“You will be in Vee’s room. That alright with you?” Kwame says, turning to Angela.
“I don’t mind,” she says.
Timothy lugs it away.
“Sorry, one of the wheels broke,” she calls after him. She turns to find Kwame looking at her, and she wonders if he can tell she has gained twenty-five pounds since he last saw her that fateful afternoon a lifetime ago when she had cherished her thin figure.
With each year away, the weight crept on. She imagines it must be a stark change for Kwame to see, especially as she is almost a foot shorter than he is. She tucks a hair out of her face nervously.
“How long you staying?” he asks.
“A week. I’m not sure. I don’t have to rush back.”
The truth is she is not sure she can re-enter the United States as her work permit has just expired, just when she decided to leave for the funeral, and her contract at the public relations firm has not been renewed. At the airport, they told her she had overstayed by six days and detained her for three hours.
“You seen Della? She’s around here somewhere. She’s in her room all the time now,” he says, putting the bags of ice in the fridge.
“Yes,” Angela says. “I saw her.”
She wishes he would not be so polite. He must have more questions. Angela cannot believe how casual he is, how easy he seems. On the phone, he had seemed guarded, cold even. It had been long enough but still she had half-expected an outburst. He has simply resigned himself to live without me, she thinks bitterly.
“She’s taking it hard,” he says, turning on the tap, his back to her. “Vee was like her real mother.”
He stops and looks over his shoulder at her.
Angela turns away. She cannot dispute it. Olivine had been more of a mother to her children than she was towards the end.
In the beginning, she had tried to stay involved. She would talk to her mother and her children every week. She knew that even if she and Kwame could not make it together, that even though she had run off with a local entertainer to another country, she was still a mother. Then the weekly call became every fortnight, then every six weeks, until they were only for holidays and birthdays – and that too fell away. She had missed all the milestones. Della had practically become a woman without her, but even if Kwame said aloud what she felt, it still smarted to hear it.
“I never mean to make you feel bad, Angela,” he says turning to her, sighing, “but, she and Vee was close, even when Vee have to punish her for running off her mouth. She was there for her. Jus’ the reality.”
“I know. I know,” Angela says, around the lump in her throat. “I am grateful to Mama.”
She hugs herself. Kwame turns back to the sink. Angela turns to leave the room.
“Oh!” Kwame says, turning around. “I forgot to tell you that Rachel lives here now.”
“I see,” is all she says, leaving the room.
She should have known with all those tacky doilies and black pigmy figurines all over the living room furniture.
*
It has given Kwame some measure of satisfaction to tell Angela this, but he has actually become very fond of the woman Angela had sent to draft papers for their divorce. Rachel was so unlike Angela – warm, uncomplicated, eager to please.
No. He was not going to apologize that he took some small pleasure that this had gotten under Angela’s skin. Rachel had not found his career a disappointment. He was not just a carpenter, but an artisan. Angela had begged him to find a real job, one where he would wear a shirt and tie and blend in seamlessly at her music clients’ events.
He goes outside now and tosses the last of the coal bits into the old coal pot, then piles some dry sticks and some dry grass to kindle the flame. He lights it, stoops to blow on the embers, and thinks about the people who will come to wish Vee well.
No one has ever said it to his face, but he knows that the men called him soft and the women, foolish. They had watched him with his young children going to the church harvest, or into town for new school uniforms, to Della’s festival competitions, to Timothy’s school shows, conspicuously without Angela. He had continued his life with an outward show of indifference that had served him well.
Yet, every night, alone in his work shed, while the children slept, he drank himself into a stupor. Angela had not liked when he drank, so he drank all the more until Della found him lying face down and had wailed because she had thought he was dead. Vee told him that he had best find a new way to ease his anger, or she would be taking the children away from him and clear across the island.
He fills the tall, cylindrical soup pot with some water and sets it on the hearth and begins peeling the yams and sweet potatoes. He grew these himself alongside Vee’s kitchen garden. He and the old woman had not gotten along for much of the time he and Angela were married, but the shared abandonment had sparked a kinship between them.
One evening, he had come in to find Della printing sums in an exercise book, and Vee beside her squinting through old spectacles at the pages. It was hard to believe this was the girl he had threatened to lock in her room if she did not do her assignment. The old woman had looked up at him, and he’d returned her reassuring smile.
When Vee got sick and started the rounds of dialysis, he had sat in the pick-up trying to compose himself at the thought of losing her.
He had still been in a haze after Angela had blindsided him, so he had been the last to realize that Rachel was inventing ways to see him, asking to verify this document or having to redraft that document – much to Vee’s displeasure.
After Angela had been gone for six months, Vee had said, “You don’t see that woman always around here fishing around you. Calling here all the time. You blind?”
He had laughed, thinking that his mother-in-law despised anyone that was not her daughter. It was only after he had broken his ankle and Rachel had driven an hour from Havendale to Old Harbour Bay and had made him gungo peas soup when Vee had gone to a night meeting that he finally begun to see.
In the beginning, he would still speak about Angela when he was with her, and it pained them both, but Rachel had that way of touching him that calmed him, her consoling hand rubbing away tensions from his shoulders, his knuckles, his chest, his abdomen. She brought with her a soothing calm that even Della began to respond with less searing looks, and Timmy became less wary of the new woman coming with them on the summer trips to St. Thomas.
As Kwame peels the corn, Della comes out of her room. She stands in the doorway, still wearing the same pink dress she has been in for the past two days.
“You want some help?”
He looks back at her. She looks so small, so meagre. The dark circles under her eyes make her appear skeletal. He is happy that she has resurfaced. He worries when she sleeps all day like this. He had gone by her room the night before, wanting to talk to her about Angela’s impending return, wanting to hear her concerns. She had ignored the wreath someone had left on their doorstep, not bothering to open the door, not bothering to take it inside. He feels that in some way he has abandoned her too, leaving her alone in her grief.
“Okay,” he says, holding out the corn to her.
They stand side by side at the sink, pulling off the husks, in silence for a while.
“Why is she staying here?” Della asks.
Kwame pauses for a moment.
“Because she is your mother, and her mother just died,” Kwame says, simply.
“Is she going to be moving back in here?”
“No,” Kwame says. “I don’t believe she will stay.”
“Good,” Della says, and Kwame feels her lean her head against his shoulder. He puts his arm around her and squeezes her briefly.
“Now, hurry up,” he says, squeezing her one last time. “People will soon start coming. Mas Reid coming with the other musicians to set up and I need to go pick some breadfruit.”
*
Della continues to pull off husks, then break the cobs in two. It helps her to be doing something, as though the action can unknot the tangle of feelings in her chest.
She realizes that when she was younger she was always a little afraid of her father. Perhaps it was the tension she’d witnessed between her parents. He always seemed in a perpetual state of anger and annoyance.
He was not like that after he met Rachel.
She recalls how she could hear, even when she and Timothy were in the house, the way her mother would shout. It didn’t stop when their grandmother came to live with them. Granny Vee had brought them solace out in the garden with her, while Della had tried not to think about how her family was falling apart.
“You have to have a calm spirit with the earth to plant good things,” Granny used to tell them. “The earth will return to you what you give it.”
Timothy comes into the kitchen now.
“You know you should at least try to talk to her,” he says. “You can give her a chance.”
Della does not respond.
“You only have one mother,” he continues.
Della throws the corn back in the sink and turns to face him.
“She stopped being my mother when she left.”
“You can say anything. People change,” he says. He opens the fridge and takes out a Red Stripe beer.
“You mad?” Della says, and takes it from him. She puts it back.
Timothy opens the fridge and takes it out again. “Look like you think you are my mother?”
“Fine,” Della says, turning back to the sink, scooping up the husks and tossing them in the trash. “Do whatever you want.”
She goes back in her room and opens her window, careful not to break the limb of the cherry tree. It is not much of a view. All she can see is the huge Julie mango tree in the neighbour’s yard, and a cow wandering near their fence that begins to ravish her father’s young ackee tree. Della makes no move to shoo away the animal.
She remembers when she won the spelling bee and came running up those back steps. She had watched her grandmother take off her gloves and twist the medal around and around in her hands, smiling. She still remembers the hug, how her bosom smelled of primroses and earth.
“Quick, go show yuh mother,” Olivine had said, almost pushing Della toward the door, but she did not need much coaxing.
“Well, who stopping you?”
Della had stopped in the kitchen when the sounds of angry voices filtered in from the living room.
“Cannot take no more of dis!”
It was her mother’s high-pitched shriek. “I have to do this for me, Kwame. For. Me. Just this once! But you would not understand that.”
“What about the children, Angela? They don’t matter? What about them, eh?” her father’s voice had boomed.
Della had placed the medal on the table and crept to her room. What was happening? America? She was lying on her bed, sniffling and staring blankly at the ceiling when the door clicked open, and her mother held up the medal asking her what it was for. That was the last time she had let her mother see her cry.
*
Timothy watches from the steps as people come in. The band is on its third cycle of “Tell Me If You Ready Fi Go”. He takes a sip of the beer and stashes the bottle among the ferns near the steps. He watches his father handing out cups of hot mannish water. He watches Rachel giving cups of white rum to some men leaning against the fence. He sees Angela standing on the other side of the backyard watching Rachel hand out the cups.
He has grown to like Rachel, but has always hoped his mother would come home. He wonders how he can make his parents rebuild the family, especially now that Granny Vee is gone.
He looks at Miss Atkins, their neighbour, come in the yard dancing all the way, tossing up her white skirt, throwing back her white scarfed head. He scoffs, remembering that this is the same woman who called the building inspector on Granny Vee to have them cut down the ackee tree she claimed was leaning over the fence into her yard. Now, here she was singing along: “Tell me if you ready fi go… Uh-huh… Tell me if you ready me fi go… Mm-hmm… Are you ready to go…”
He does not understand the purpose of a nine-night other than giving people an excuse to go to a dead yard and stuff themselves at the expense of someone else’s grief. He hates the din, the excess, the chatter. He takes another sip of the beer. He does not like the taste, but likes the way it lulls him. They will be here all night, but he has already told his granny goodbye. He pours some in the bush to wish her safe travels, then puts the bottle to his head.
She was always firm with him. She would not approve of his drinking the beer, but she would not have told his father either. She would have cuffed him upside the head and told him, instead, another version of the cautionary story of his grandfather, the Guinness, and the motorcycle crash.
He looks at his mother now. Miss Atkins is hugging her, but he does not believe it is full of the feeling the woman’s animated face implies. Angela is saying thank you to them, looking lost, standing there swaying awkwardly to the staccato sounds of the keyboard, the brash bass pulsating and the man endlessly singing the same song.
He thinks about the letter he wrote his mother when he turned nine, begging her to come back and the disappointment that came when she said she could not, not just yet. Yet, he could not hold onto the sorrowful, angry feeling as long as Della has. He watches her serve fried fish and bammy on plastic plates. She does not look as sallow as she did earlier, he notices.
“Tell me if you ready fi go… Uh-huh…”
Timothy gets up and goes inside. The beer has begun to make his head swim.
*
Angela knows her mother would not have liked this fuss, the people coming in and trampling on her garden, gyrating to this music, but she knows it is the expected way. It does give her a good feeling seeing the throng, knowing how loved Vee was.
She looks again at Rachel with her perfectly flat-ironed hair and thin physique. She does not remember her being this pretty or this smiley, but it’s Kwame she watches now. He seems altered to her. She remembers how he would avoid having to deal with any of the industry people she brought home, having to pander to them, but here he is playing host effortlessly. She watches him lean over and say something to Rachel and notes the tender way the woman holds his shoulder.
At times, when Angela has woken up in a foreign place thousands of miles away, she has wished she had never left, but could never see a clear path back.
She could still hear her mother’s voice telling her that a parent must put her child above herself.
“I am doing this for them, Mama,” she had said on the day she decided to leave. “It’s not right for them to see us fighting all the time, and plus, this opportunity in America is going to give us much more stability.”
“If you think is the right thing to do,” her mother said in that way that always irritated her. It was full of disapproval, the go-and-see-for-yourself-challenge, but said in a warm, round tone. Angela didn’t point out that another man had turned her head, the kind of man she had always envisioned for herself – a man without calluses and broken English or silences she could not understand.
If she had still been a girl, Vee would have told her a tale, like the time she was eight, had disobeyed and picked the starapples meant for market before they were ready. When she suffered a painful stomachache, her mother said it was punishment enough, but she told her the story about the boy and the drum and how his mother and father warned the boy not to go into the bushland to hunt for food that day.
“Why not?” She had asked her mother.
“Because it was dangerous,” Vee had said. “Because children need to listen to the wise counsel of their parents. Sometimes we see trouble long before it comes.”
“Did he die in the bush, Mama?” she’d asked.
“No, dear heart,” Vee said. “He did not die. The rains came down, and the boy came across a tortoise who gave him shelter in a little house, but the tortoise meant him no good and when the boy was drying himself in one of the rooms, the tortoise stuck him in a hollow drum and covered him with the skin of another animal. This skin he got from an obeah woman who put a charm on it, so the boy could not come out on his own. He stayed in there three days wishing he had listened to the warning and only when the tortoise beat the drum and the boy was made to sing did his parents hear his voice from afar off.”
“And then he died, Mama?”
“He could have, but his parents loved him so much they found a way to free him, but not before he learned his lesson. They tricked the tortoise with the promise of a grand dinner.”
“With ox-tail or peppered steak and fat crayfish?”
“Yes. I suppose he liked those things as much as you. The tortoise ate and ate, and while he was eating, the mother went and cut the special skin off the drum and released her child, and before the tortoise could reach him, the father tossed him into a waiting pot of boiling water. The boy listened to his parents after that.”
“But they killed the tortoise, Mama. Is a sad story,” she had said with a laugh.
“Yes. They did it to save their child. Now go wash your hands and come and get this soup.”
“Is it tortoise soup?” She’d broken out into giggles but did as she was told.
Now, Angela sips the mannish water and lets its warmth spread through her. She also lets herself weep silently.
Am I too late, Mama?
She looks up at the darkened sky, and the stars wink at her through her tears.
“Mama, if you can hear me,” she whispers, “I miss you. I’m so sorry.”
She presses her fingers to her lips and holds it up to the sky. She wonders if she has lost the only person who loved her completely. She looks over at Della walking toward her. The girl quickly extends a plate of fish and bammy to her.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Angela begins to say, “but it’s okay. It’s fine.”
She grasps the plate. Della lingers, seeming to hesitate.
“Did you make any of it?” Angela asks.
“Yes. Granny Vee taught me how to soak and fry the bammy and how to fry the fish, so it is crispy but not burnt.” Angela looks down at her hands where she is holding one side of the plate and Della is holding the other.
“Then I would like to try it,” she says.
Della shrugs, releases the plate, and walks away. Angela watches her daughter walk away from her for the second time that day.
Perhaps all she can hope for is to atone. In time.
She looks over at the singer-man who has finally begun to play a new song, and Angela begins to sway again.
Contributor Notes
Wandeka Gayle is a Jamaican writer, a visual artist, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Spelman College. She has been awarded writing fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and the Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. She received her PhD in English with a Creative Writing (Fiction) concentration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her debut collection of short stories, Motherland and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press in July 2020. One of the stories has been nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her other writing has appeared or will be featured in The Rumpus, Transition, Pleiades, Interviewing the Caribbean, and elsewhere.
